entertainment

A new mobile application called Dull wants to fill your moments of downtime by offering a feed of random content to mindlessly browse through, including photos, music, GIFs, news and information, products, and more. The end result is an app that lets you stare mindlessly at your phone, when there’s nothing else to do – or when you’ve grown tired of scrolling through… Read More

Bharti SoftBank, a joint venture between business group Bharti Enterprises and SoftBank Corp., announced today that it has acquired a 36.5 percent stake in ScoopWhoop, an Indian-focused media startup. Though financial terms were undisclosed, the deal is interesting because it’s the latest in a series of investments by SoftBank in Indian startups. The Japanese telecom giant recently said… Read More

Musician and actor Jared Leto stopped by BoxWorks today and talked digital transformation in the entertainment industry, and in the ultimate act of sharing, he passed around his Oscar so people could take pictures with it.
Leto has been in the music and movie industry for a long time and as he pointed out, back in the day, he couldn’t communicate directly with his audience. There was… Read More

San Francisco-based kids’ app platform Fingerprint is teaming up with UK educational app maker Mindshapes. The two companies are collaborating on a series of new digital learning activities called “appisodes,” which combine both storytelling and games. It’s the first in what promises to be a busy year of Fingerprint announcements, partnerships, and app launches Read More

Today, Nick Bilton of the New York Times published a pretty extensive piece on Twitter, specifically its CEO, Dick Costolo. As I read it, one paragraph concerning the potential IPO of the company struck me. Read More

For over a decade, if you were to say “home shopping,” you were likely referring to the experience of viewing products on your TV set, and ordering over the phone. After launching in the ’80s, it wasn’t long before television networks like QVC and The Home Shopping Network (HSN) had become synonymous with “home shopping.” The Web and eCommerce changed that. Read More

One of the best manga ever created, Akira, is going to the big screen. And this time, it won’t be an anime (like the one from 1988) but a live-action film. We first reported about plans to shoot the live-action remake, whose rights were bought by Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way, back in February 2008. The idea was scrapped a few months later, until New York… Read More

No doubt, Gundam is Japan’s favorite anime. They opened a Gundam Cafe in Akihabara, they erected a 1:1 scale Gundam statue in Tokyo bay, and they keep offering tons of Gundam-powered stuff on a monthly basis. The 1/60 Gundam statue replica (30cm) we showed you last November, for example, wasn’t bad, but today Bandai unveiled something even cooler: a Gundam model that stands… Read More

NTT DoComo, Japan’s largest cell phone carrier (55 million customers), is currently running a pretty bizarre viral promotion campaign in this country (both on- and offline). The company has set up a weird website [JP] that, for some strange reason, shows Darth Vader running around Tokyo and asking who’s his boss (“Who is my boss” is the official tag line of the campaign). Read More

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Remember Gigantor? Remember last October, when the Japanese city of Kobe erected a 18m high statue of the giant anime robot? Granted, the robo statue is nowhere near as big as its Gundam counterpart, but it’s still pretty cool. Read More

We’ve given you the first plot details and pictures on Friday, but now the first trailer for Resident Evil: Afterlife (aka Resident Evil 4) is online. It’s pretty cool (well, it shows more of the same), mentioning the movie was filmed with the “James Cameron / Vincent Pace Fusion Camera System”, the “World’s Most Advanced 3D Technology”. Read More

We spent two posts covering the announcement of the fourth installment of the Resident Evil movie series last summer, and today we can give you the first five pictures and some plot details. Titled “Resident Evil 4: Afterlife”, the movie is scheduled for release in American theaters (both conventional and 3D) on September 10. Read More

I assumed that VHS tapes had gone the route of Polaroid film and were continuing to be phased out of existence. I must have been too hasty, because according to the Entertainment Retailer’s Association, videocassette sales in Britain have more than doubled in the past year. Read More

Augmented Reality is a pretty hot topic currently, but it seems to me that the Japanese in particular have really embraced the concept of mixing the real world with computer-generated imagery and data. One case in point is the Crimsonfox project [JP], an “Alternative Reality” scavenger hunt game event that took place over the weekend in Tokyo, Japan. Read More

We’ve shown you the new Tron trailer 48 hours ago in bootleg quality, but you can forget that one now and rather watch this high-quality version. Judging from these 2.30 minutes, we’re in for something cool. Read More

We’ve given you a first look at Iron Man 2 way back in June last year, and two months ago, we reported it will be Marvel’s first IMAX movie when it hits screens on May 7, 2010. It’s 2.32 minutes long and very, very cool. Read More

I have a list of things that I plan to do once I become absolutely ridiculously rich. Being a blogger armed with a liberal-arts degree puts me on the perfect path, I know. The item right after building a house with secret passageways everywhere is calling up the guys from Goldmund and having them come by and install their top-of-the-line sound system. They invited me up to their brand new… Read More

In November last year, we’ve shown you not one but two trailers for the Prince of Persia movie, and both turned out to be quite decent. And this third full-length trailer (courtesy of IGN) for one of this summer’s blockbusters doesn’t look too shabby either. Read More

You’ve seen that commercial for Hulu, right? The one with Alec Baldwin sashaying around a futuristic office promising TV everywhere, TV that turns your brain into mush? Take that idea—TV everywhere—and apply it to your biology. That is, how does TV implanted into your contact lenses sound? Really great, or just great? Absolutely horrendous, or just horrendous? Read More